honeycombing

I have been productive as a bee this week, even with the weather taking a dive back to cold. Over the weekend I had enough time to run one round of casts that yielded one mimic and three ornaments. With the vermilion doll now painted, her limbs completed last week, and progress on her clothing being at about 40%, she should be all finished up next week. This go around I will be finishing dolls up one or two at a time, so by the time the shop update rolls around in June you should know everything that will be available well in advance. I think this will be a lot less stressful on my end. I may have said all of this in my prior post; I can't recall and the squirming toddler on my lap isn't giving me the time to go look. 
Anyway, back to the progress from this week. As I said, the vermilion doll has been cast and painted. I still need to seal her this evening and I am toying with adding some splattering to her. I tried dyeing fabric with turmeric for the first time. The first round wasn't great. I added way to much ground turmeric and became distracted, leaving the fabric soaking much too long. The color came out way too bright and saturated for my tastes. I dyed the fabric again with some black tea, hoping that would help darken and dull it. That seemed to do the trick. Round two of turmeric dyeing went much better. I added very little and took the fabrics out quickly in intervals of 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, and 15 minutes. I was more than pleased with the results. I am incorporating all of the dyed fabrics into the honey mimic by sewing very small honeycomb shaped pieces together to make her bodice. It is a lot of work, but I think the end result will be more than worth it.